Category Archives: You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are

My holiday card tradition on Thanksgiving day

Habits can be extremely rewarding.

One of mine is to write my holiday cards on Thanksgiving day. I have kept this tradition for more years than I can recall. No matter where I have lived or what happened on that day, I always found time to think about those in my life, including family and friends.

The act of writing and remembering reminds me of the bonds of connection I have with people far-flung across this country. Some of these connections help sustain me, good times and bad. Some have little impact in my life.

I went with an Oregon-themed card this year. In past years I have made my own. On each of the cards I create a personal message, written by hand and signed. A regular theme, if I can find one, is to share a positive wish of good fortune for the coming year. It is always preferable to be positive, even when we know some persons may be experiencing hard times, like some of my relations and friendships.

In my case, my card writing involves my circle of friends who seem to remain a part of my life as I age. They can be called my “chosen circle.” They are not family, for me at least. They matter a great deal in my life.

My “family card list” includes my step-family, my adoptive family, and my biological family. Because I am adoptee, and because that status is fraught with complexities about the meaning of “family,” my holiday card tradition has challenged me.

Having had a step-family since I was 18 years old, I can vouch first-hand that these relations are not easy. Step-family bonds are not blood-based or kinship-based.

Everyone in those dynamics knows the minefields, and to deny these tensions is to deny the critical role of genetic kinship in how all species, including humans, care for and help their close genetic relations succeed. This is equally if not truer of adoptive-family relationships.

I explore this in my greater detail in my adoptee memoir and critical exploration of the U.S. adoption system, in my chapter appropriately titled “Blood is thicker than water.”

Author and adoptee Rudy Owens gets ready to mail his 2022 holiday cards to his biological, step-, and adoptive family and friends on Thanksgiving day 2022.

In my book, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, I write about the meaning of relationships with non-biologically related step-family and other distal adoptive kin: “There simply is no bond that joins us, much the way I feel about my adoptive cousins, uncles, and aunts. For me, there is no blood that ties us, nor DNA to bind us. We are not true kin, both as I perceive it and as I have experienced this relation for decades now.”

Yet each year, on Thanksgiving I will still write letters of fellowship for the coming Christmas, or winter holidays if you prefer to call it that.

There is very little power I have to create relations where none are hardwired to exist by the determinant laws of biology and genetics. What I do control is my ability to offer a hopeful gesture. Whether that gesture is accepted or rejected, like so much in our lives, is not in our power to manage.

Because I was separated as a newborn baby from my biological family by laws and systems that erased my past and discriminated against me and millions of others by status of birth, I only began my biological family relations in my mid-20s. I explain all of this in my book for any reader seeking to understand what that means for me and other adoptees.

As someone who is now in my mid-50s and getting older, I remain clear-eyed how those relations will remain forever impacted by this system of separating families. And with my surviving biological family members who I do have contact with, again, I am not able to control how they respond. It has never been simple or easy to explain to anyone who is not adopted and separated from their biological family relations.

So with Thanksgiving now behind us, and my holiday cards on their way to my blended, adoptive, and biological family, I will celebrate what some may call our betters selves, to be the person I prefer to be.

Yes, adoption as a system forever made my holidays a mixed up time, but I have, for decades now, not let this define the meaning I give this time of year freely.

No I will not share pictures to entertain you

Rudy Owens and his adoptive mother, 2008

Trends regarding adoptee rights advocacy come and go, and some stay and have lasting power. One I am seeing the past couple of days is promoting the importance of genetic closeness, ahead of National Adoption Month. Adult adoptees are showing photos of their birth kin they may know to show biological connections and to subvert what the month means to millions of adopted persons. I refuse to do that. I have several reasons I will share.

First, I refuse to be part of a spectacle for entertainment for others because of a broken and inequitable system. My severed connections are not for your pleasure. They demand collective actions by allies and political leaders to fix problems in order to support millions denied basic legal rights. More importantly, there are millions of adopted persons who may never meet their kin or ever see anyone who looks like them. This is spiritually painful to many of them, and it creates additional pain where there is a dark hole already.

Finally, this form of sharing allows us to ignore the greater and more important issues of finding solutions to overcome legal, cultural, and political barriers that prevent lasting reform. So yeah, count me out of another social media trend. I will be thinking about those adoptees who are of all ages and who are still denied knowledge of who they are and from whence they come.

For the record, when I launched my website for my memoir on the U.S. adoption system, I created an online gallery where I intentionally blacked out the identities of my biological and adoptive kin. It was my way of making clear my denied biological family connections will never be used as clickbait for media or anyone else for voyeuristic pleasure. I will not participate in this type of online bread and circus. Eventually I may share photos, but it will be purposeful so that it supports the larger goals of my efforts to restore adoptees’ legal rights.

‘Talking Story’ with Bryan Elliott on his podcast Living in Adoptionland

Bryan Elliott, host of Living in Adoptionland, and Rudy Owens, author of You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are

Earlier this month, I sat down with fellow adoptee and now podcaster Bryan Elliott to discuss the U.S. adoption system and why I wrote my book examining that institution and my journey through it. I had no idea where our conversation would land. However, I trusted Bryan’s professionalism as a writer, director, and multimedia producer to allow our conversation to wander where it naturally wanted to go.

Bryan posted our conversation this week on his podcast channel, Living in Adoptionland. I could not be happier with the interview and the high quality of the production.

Bryan had contacted me in late spring and invited me to his new show, which he launched in late May. And he’s been busy, having already published nearly a dozen shows, with conversations with some fellow adoptees I know from their advocacy on Twitter and other spaces where adoptees advocate for reform to a system that has impacted millions of people.

Bryan shares this summary why he’s producing his show now. He describes it as “the podcast I wish I had before I started on my journey more than 25 years ago. It’s a mosaic of real stories from the adoption community which includes parents who gave up their children, families struggling with infertility and natural conception, and the often silent adult adoptees.”

Before we taped the podcast, with Bryan in southern California and me in Portland, we agreed to a couple of ground rules. One was that I did not want to be involved in efforts that were contrary to my larger goal in writing my book of restoring rights to adoptees, and he respected that. Another point we both agreed to was to not center ourselves in the much larger national crisis surrounding the Supreme Court’s ending of legal abortion in the United States in June with its disastrous decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. That recent, historic decision by the right-leaning court ended nearly 50 years of bedrock reproductive and legal rights secured for women.

Both of us, in our conversations before the taping, recognized this decision had tremendous impacts on women. As adult adoptees, we also both knew too well what this likely meant for the promotion of adoption by those who overturned this half-century-old legal precedent. Speaking for myself, I believe Bryan shared my own view that having two white guys talking about an issue that impacts so many women, including many brown and black women, would not be appropriate, even though as adoptees we probably would have critical perspectives to share on the national policy debate that is falsely promoting adoption as the policy alternative to abortion healthcare. In the end, we did mention this topic because one cannot talk about adoption in 2022 without talking about abortion and how that intersects with adoptees as a huge group of Americans.

With the big issues agreed upon, we could then turn to other topics he wanted to ask about and I was able to share about my now four-year-old memoir and public health analysis of this massive and still discriminatory system. Some of the themes I touched on were:

Understanding how adoption must be seen sociologically because of its history tied to the larger historic problem of illegitimacy;
How doctors played a bedrock role in the massive expansion of adoption in the United States after the 1940s and how that role ensures it remains a legitimate and acceptable “practice,” even when it separates mothers and their children;
How my life as an adoptee has evolved over time, providing me insights shared by writers and thinkers I admire, including Viktor Frankl;
Explaining to others how being adopted and being denied rights means confronting lies, discrimination, and harm that is institutionalized and continues to harm countless persons.

I would encourage those who are interested in learning more about adoption to listen to his previous interviews and to bookmark his podcast platform. And as an adoptee, I want to say how refreshing it is to talk about adoption and not have my basic human rights challenged because the interviewer did not do their homework in understanding how adoption impacts millions of persons denied their legal rights and basic human rights to know who they are.

Thanks again, Bryan. Keep up the great work. I will be tuning in again to more conversations on Living in Adoptionland.

To learn more about Bryan, visit his website here. You can reach out to Bryan here.

You can continue to reach me on my website. My hope is this conversation inspired some listeners to want to learn more and buy my book.

The ups and downs of ‘adoptee Twitter’

Rudy Owens Memoir Twitter Account Banner

The Twitter account banner for Rudy Owens’ memoir on the U.S. adoption system.

I created my adoptee memoir Twitter account in 2017 as a way to help promote my memoir and book, which provides a critical look at the U.S. adoption system after World War II and my place in that larger story. Since I launched the account, I have used it to stay engaged on adoptee rights issues and issues related to domestic and inter-country adoption.

Twitter has many downsides. I find it can be a swirling pool of misinformation and emotion, which has been weaponized by autocrats like former president Donald Trump and state actors like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and many other nations that have exploited its glaring vulnerabilities. It also has been a major source of misinformation during the pandemic, and that likely will remain.

On the positive side, Twitter still remains a place that gives space to alternative points of view that is empowering. It has own subcultures, like “Black twitter,” “feminist twitter,” “Asian-American Twitter,” “adoptee Twitter,” and many, many more.

In these leaderless but visible groups, participants express views that challenge coverage in legacy and mainstream media on issues relevant to their affected groups. This has long been documented.

One study dating from 2016 by the Knight Foundation on this form of expression quoted a self-defined participant of feminist Twitter, who said, “The reason I often don’t trust mainstream pieces or outlets is because they very rarely go talk to the people affected by the issue. They don’t consider people in a community experts in their lives, like we living it aren’t experts in our own experiences.”

This is an idea very common among those who reference the term “adoptee twitter” and who use Twitter to address issues relevant to their lives, policy discussions, media bias, racism, hate speech, legislative debates, harm to those adopted, and more.

Like any group without a corporate or government moderator controlling opinion, views will vary. Twitter, by its nature, rewards emotion, anger, rage, and also views that elicit strong responses. This is not a place for thoughtful contemplation. That said, insights and wisdom can be found here.

I continue to use this space to share facts and media coverage relevant to policy issues, media bias that incorrectly describes adoption, legislative issues relevant to impacted adopted persons, and insights that I have from disciplines and ideas that matter to those who work to educate the public and reshape outdated views.

This weekend I shared a Tweet for those who use Twitter in this world of adoptees who communicate in this space. I said this was my perspective using Twitter as an adoptee:

Your experience is your expertise. Your story matters!
You don’t need to quote “experts.” In time others notice your value.
Align with folks who are positive and who lead by example.
#Facts still always matter!

I also see my Twitter communications as a responsibility to help millions of others. Mostly because of my Twitter communications, I have reached an audience for my book on this system. Some possible readers and even my followers may never like this approach to this system, but that’s OK. Telling one’s story requires having faith in one’s truth. And for me, my story remains firmly grounded in historic, scientific, and public health research, not my “feelings.”

For now, I am planning to continue using my Twitter account to promote my book, because I think my work has great relevancy for understanding adoption as an overlooked and important public health issue requiring immediate legislative action now to address injustices and documented harm to millions.

I also want to keep using Twitter as a place to engage the public and share facts being overlooked. I did this most recently to support ongoing efforts underway now in Vermont, led by adult adoptees born there, to restore rights to adoptees to access their birth records without discrimination and as a right protected by law.

I can also see the day when one day I will say, that’s enough. I am done.

I am not quite there, but ultimately, the way Twitter is constructed does not align with how I prefer to approach the world, because Twitter is driven by impulse, immediacy, and emotional responses. We have seen the downsides of this, and stepping back may be the best solution for me later.

Why adoptee rights advocacy should use a public health lens

When I wrote my memoir and critical study of the U.S. adoption experience, I deleted a chapter where I highlighted divisions among many of the millions of adoptees, notably those who want to focus mainly on their personal feelings about this experience and those who focus more on making systemic changes to end inequities to many.

This is a long debate, and I strategically dropped this section because I thought it would become a distraction. There are many ways this plays out, and I am choosing not to amplify works and ideas that I do not think will lead to change. Nor do I want to tell others how to navigate meaning in their lives. Those decisions remain with the individual, and no one but the person has the ability to confront those realities.

Making systemic change requires a focus on upstream advocacy, to fix the root issues and problems.

Since publishing my book, I have had some modest successes, including calling attention to how the United States fails to even count adoptees, which would be one step forward. This ongoing and intentional failure by the U.S. Census reveals larger issues of bias to adoptees and how the power dynamics of the interconnected institutions and interests co-mingle with sustaining modern adoption while not reforming it.

I would love to see more fellow adoptees, especially among those who advocate for systemic changes—what public health folks call upstream advocacy—talk about the intersection of public health, adoption, and adoptee rights issues.

Adoption is and will remain a public health concern, since the public health systems at the local, state and federal level in this country helped build this system and sustain it, for domestic and inter-country adoptions.

I am fortunate that I have a background in public health, so I can make these connections much more easily. As I wrote in what I call my first of its kind public health memoir on adoption: “I use public health concepts that focus on laws and systems that have an impact on large groups of people. A public health lens lets one look at outcomes, including the health of adoptees and those born illegitimately. This approach points out flaws that can be fixed, particularly if we look at evidence and science as well as how adoption systems work best.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provide this model to explain how a public health approach addresses problems and promotes population health.

Unfortunately, I have found few adoptees with this formal education, and that may be one reason why this method and lens have not been widely shared by them as a means to highlight the root issues and show a path to change with institutions that wield unhealthy power over the lives of millions of adoptees because of laws and policies.

As I have written before, health and public health groups have a moral obligation to advocate for the wellbeing of all adopted Americans as a population. Both also have a responsibility to correct their past historic roles creating a system that denies adoptees rights and also health information that could potentially be life-saving for some.

I am still confident that the approach I outlined in my book will gain traction, among journalists who continue to ignore root issues and also among adoptees themselves.

I also know this journey will be long. I have not given up hope because the goal remains to fix the larger problems, and changing laws and systems will help the greatest number of people who continue to be denied basic legal rights and knowledge of who they are.